Venice: Amy Adams Gains Best Actress Momentum with ‘Arrival’

Though not as enthusiastically well-received as previous Oscar contenders that have premiered at Venice in the past (Gravity, Birdman), Amy Adams’ Arrival stands to make a solid dent in the Best Actress race if initial reactions are to be believed.

The Denis Villeneuve-directed drama reportedly continues the French-Canadian filmmaker’s tradition of helming quality, compelling dramas, though it, according to critics, like recent sci-fi epics in the vein of Interstellar, loses a bit of its steam as it juggles a somewhat mystifying third act.

Adams’ performance is being praised, however, as is Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score and Bradford Young’s cinematography. With a bigger studio behind it (Paramount), Arrival could generate more traction than Villeneuve’s well-received 2015 drama Sicario, which only received three tech nominations despite year-end critics awards showering it with honors. Paramount is seemingly on their game in terms of mounting a long-standing campaign for the film, after their Selma debacle in 2014.

Check out what the critics are saying about Arrival in the reviews, below.

“Yet for a film so preternaturally involved in the deep roots of language and communication (its few jokes are riddles about the Sanskrit word for war and the etymology of the word “kangaroo”) Heisserer’s script is surprisingly unwordy. The Sapir-Whorf concept, which posits that language determines how we think and suggests that full immersion in a foreign language might therefore be a way to change the workings of the mind at the most basic level, is casually referenced despite being the crux of the plot. Instead Bradford Young‘s visuals do a great deal of the storytelling, along with Adams’ exceptional performance, the evocative sound design and Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s insta-classic strings-based score (when the aliens come, let there be cellos)…. It’s ingrained so deeply in Western culture that science and art are oppositional disciplines, that math and physics belong to one branch of endeavor and creativity, expressiveness and philosophy to another. And that is why great science fiction cinema — and this is great science fiction cinema — can feel like such a pre-eminent genre. Here, using an art form that was itself born of technology, we get to venture out past those simplistic binaries to where there is poetry in mathematics and physics in philosophy — out into the frontiers of our universe and our power to comprehend where science and art are the very same thing. “Arrival” brings us there, and though the conclusions are earthbound and have so much to do with the nature of humanity and our relationship to mortality, my God, they’re full of stars.”

“Playing ferociously intelligent characters is nothing new for Adams (say what you will about the recent Superman movies, she plays Lois Lane as a better investigative reporter than any of her predecessors), and she brings a wonderful sense of curiosity as a linguist faced with the challenge of translating a species that creates sentences (that look like circles) out of gas that comes out of tentacles… If “Arrival” falls short in any way, it’s in a third-act pivot that attempts to appeal to the heart as much as to the head. Louise’s personal story is a powerful one, and the film never betrays this fascinating character, but it has so successfully created such a cool and detached vibe that it’s a bit jarring to get a last-minute play for the emotions. It’s not impossible to give audiences both a puzzle-box narrative and an exploration of life choices and what it means to be human, but the balance just doesn’t play here. (For what it’s worth, the movie does play personal concerns against intergalactic ones with more grace than “Interstellar” managed to do.) In films like “Sicario” and “Enemy,” Villeneuve remained true to his storytelling, no matter how potentially off-putting, but then neither of those were made for a major studio. Still, that slightly abrupt shift isn’t enough to significantly diminish the power and the problem-solving pleasures of “Arrival.”

“Arrival’s ideas about language are reflected in its own storytelling methods in ways far too smart to spoil, and which result in a mid-film realisation – less sudden twist than sinuous unwinding – that forces you to reinterpret everything you’ve seen. (Much of it relates to an extended opening flashback in which Louise raises, then loses, a daughter.) The time to pull this stuff apart probably isn’t two months before Arrival’s UK release, so let’s just say the food for thought on offer here is Michelin-star-worthy. It turns an already beautiful, provocative allegory into the kind of science-fiction that can bump your whole worldview off balance. This is riveting, dizzying stuff from Villeneuve, and another early peak in a thunderously exciting year at the Venice Film Festival.”

“If the gatekeepers of classic screen sci-fi are at all anxious about the stamp that director Denis Villeneuve might put on his upcoming Blade Runner project — a sequel coming 35 years after the iconic original — then the class, intelligence and cool visual style of Arrival should provide reassurance. How refreshing to watch an alien contact movie in which no cities are destroyed or monuments toppled, and no adversarial squabbling distracts the human team from the challenges of their complex interspecies encounter. Anchored by an internalized performance from Amy Adams rich in emotional depth, this is a grownup sci-fi drama that sustains fear and tension while striking affecting chords on love and loss.”

#Arrival is more than a sci-fi: it’s a movie about communication and the power of words. So moving #Venezia73

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Once, when he was three, Joey Nolfi fancied himself as an exotic type and boldly told someone that he was “from North America.” He’s taken that status as self-appointed ambassador of the North American people and built with it a budding career in entertainment journalism. In other words: he’s written about awards season, film, pop culture, and the arts for a variety of publications including Entertainment Weekly, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, AFROPUNK, East End Fashion Magazine, and Naima Mora Online. He also acts, makes films, moonlights as a DJ/general nightlife legend, and can’t wait for the day that his friends have children that he can to take to the zoo one time and then spend the rest of his life patting himself on the back for it.

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Editor-in-Chief Joey Nolfi sifted through 87 years of Best Picture winners to come up with a formula that gauges Oscar traction. He ranked the films heading into this year's race, so you should check it out.

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RT @joeynolfi: AND ALSO Happy Presidents’ Day to President Natalie Portman at the end of Mars Attacks https://t.co/NrJGzYnAYh